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Get Social

Social Media is a tremendous marketing tool for your station, and if it’s used correctly, could greatly help your station not only gain listeners, but sell more effective advertising as well.

Spending a lot of time looking at Radio Station websites, as well as their respective social outlets, the trend in radio seems to be one of the following:

No social media presence at all

Boring posts that don’t do much to promote things happening at the station

Good posts are fragmented and untimely

This isn’t the case for all radio stations, as some have really nailed their social strategy and are capitalizing on all of the benefits that a strong well-defined social presence provides. There are many different ways to do this, but they all generally have one common theme: good content.

One strategy is to choose one person at the station to take ownership of the whole process. This is usually effective in creating a “voice” for your social presence. Your “Digital Strategist” will help to ensure brand consistency across all of your social channels. Typically this person is able to find a sweet spot in terms of the content, knowing content that your listeners are more likely to interact with. To do it right can be a time consuming task, which is why sometimes more of a team strategy should be put into place.

The team strategy needs to follow the same general guidelines in terms of creating interesting content via a well-defined social presence and strategic direction. Allow DJ’s or other team members to utilize social media to promote specific parts of their shows. The possibilities here are endless: listener interactions for song requests, user generated content, contest promotion, the list goes on. When you have mostly live content with DJ’s open to speaking their mind not only on the airwaves, but online, the team strategy has the potential to pull in different types of listeners to your “hub” who may not have spent the time subscribing to your updates before.

As your following grows and your posts become more engaging, you’ll start seeing your listener interaction numbers start to grow. You’ll be exposed to more and more potential followers and listeners, (in the case of Facebook, the amount of interactions is directly proportionate to how many eyes will be on your posts, as the interactions grow, so will the potential eyeballs).

Advertisers will start taking notice to your well defined strategy and increased listener participation, giving your social media presence instant value. Sure you can advertise via Facebook’s platform, but why not provide sponsored posts and cut out the middle man? Not to mention the increase in perceived value of working with your station gained from a thriving community on the web.

Your station has the ability, and in most cases the personalities to create this experience. It’s up to you to leverage these powerful tools to your advantage, and put a strategy in place to maximize the social web.